Dibble’s Hobbies owner Jeff Chladek stands in front of a unique TraySure case made by previous owners Raymond Johnson and Lynn Hurta. The case was customized with sliding shelves to showcase the store’s

Gilbert Moreno figures he was just a junior high student when he first walked into Dibble's Hobbies.

“And it was quite eye-opening for me,” says Moreno, now a 50-year-old contract design engineer. “I'd been to toy stores before but never anything like that.”

With its many model locomotives and boxcars, plastic tanks and fighter planes and miniature sword-bearers and other warriors, it's no wonder: Dibble's looks like a walk-in time capsule for classic, do-it-yourself diversions.

And that's just the way Jeff Chladek likes to keep it — the hobby shop you remembered as a kid, no matter what your age.

“Hobby shops in general are connections; the kind of stuff we sell is bits of history,” says Chladek, who co-manages Dibble's with his sister Joanie Chladek.

For more than 50 years, Dibble's has called the cozy confines of Jefferson Village home. And while grocery stores like Piggly Wiggly and five-and-dimes like Winn's have come and gone from that shopping center, Dibble's still stands in the same 2,000-square-foot spot, much like one of the dioramas on display that come from its more talented customers.

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Like Henry Nunez with his detailed 1/35- scale military models, including a hunched group of 12th SS Panzer Division troops. Or local comic artist Joe Wight with his thumb-size fantasy works, like his teeny, made-from-scratch Millennium Falcons from “Star Wars.”

Then there's Moreno's intricately detailed N-scale train diorama, which he completed in 1985. The rustic display stands near the center of the store, still challenging eagle-eyed shoppers to spot its teeny birds and other not-so-hidden charms.

Moreno crafted the N-scale train display partly to help customers see and test model trains at that small a scale, partly as a nod to the first train set his dad bought him many years ago. His creation graced the January 1991 cover of Model Railroader magazine.

Model trains make up about half of Dibble's sales, as well as store space. Ron Nagel, president of the San Antonio Model Railroad Association, credits the shop's longevity in part to keeping up with the emerging technology in model railroading over the last 25 years.

That longevity, Nagel adds via email, also has to do with what Dibble's doesn't change.

“Most of us, who have been in the hobby for a while, remember the old cluttered hobby shops where we used to go after school was out,” Nagel says. “Dibble's is very much like that.”

Dibble's history is just as storied as its glue-together inventory. Chladek estimates the business dates back to 1905, when it opened its doors as an Alamo Street bicycle shop that dabbled in sporting goods and toys at Christmas. Brothers Jack and Kim Dibble inherited Dibble's from their father and later sold it in 1955 to Raymond Johnson, his father and his cousin.

In a typewritten history by Raymond Johnson called “The Dibble's Journey,” Johnson supposes they then moved the shop to Houston Street across from the Alamo in 1957 and added the Jefferson Village location later that year, minus the hunting and camping equipment.

Soon the downtown location closed, leaving the Jefferson Village store to carry on the fine tradition of building HO-scale train sets, model automobiles, military vehicles and role-playing war games.

Johnson's friend Lynn Hurta purchased the store in 1991, but he died a little more than a year later. Hurta's widow, Genie, kept the business going until Chladek's parents bought the store for him and his sister to take over in 1995.

Today, Dibble's displays many of its colorful model trains in the same TraySure cases Johnson crafted and patented with Hurta in the early 1970s.

And a mountain diorama still looms in the back of the store, a sprawling plaster display that houses HO-scale trains and tracks that snake around a tiny village teeming with pastel plastic dinosaurs and other monsters out of a '50s B-movie.

Jeff Chladek calls the back-store presentation, a second iteration that dates back to the early 1990s, “a test-bed for silliness.” That whimsy permeates the shop, from the storefront window that houses Juanita, a wooden figurehead festooned with beads, and Phideaux, a model dinosaur sporting a tank top and sunglasses, to Joanie Chladek herself, who'll be the first to tell you those bruises on her wiry frame come from tackling opponents in the Sugar N Spice Football League.

“You have to (have a sense of humor),” Jeff Chladek says.

Clearly, for a decades-old store still without a website, Dibble's has had to cultivate a connection with customers that goes well beyond just ringing up another Tamiya tank, Revell racecar or Atlas N-scale train engine. That connection goes well beyond a single generation.

Like many Dibble's regulars, Moreno still visits the shop, as do his son and grandson.

“I think there's a lot of people who do that,” Moreno says. “They take their kids and then their kids take their kids. ... My wife already knows that if she can't locate me, then that's one of the first places she calls.”

Chladek likes to say Dibble's is more a service business than a retail business, which certainly accounts for its customers keeping the store in the family.

“But making that first impression is everything,” Chladek says.

Especially when that impression feels like the first time all over again.